Who will build the homes Cyprus needs?

The housing debate in Cyprus is too one-sided. It is invariably about how many people are looking for a home, how much rents have risen and how difficult it has become for young couples to buy a place of their own. The solutions on the table tend to follow much the same course. More incentives, faster permits, tax relief and new support schemes. All are useful and necessary. On their own, however, they are not enough. There is another, often overlooked, side to the debate. Even if every permit were approved tomorrow, land was available and funding secured for every new project, one crucial question would remain. Who is going to build all these homes, and in what way? The European Commission housing report on Cyprus makes the scale of the challenge clear. The housing supply gap in Cyprus is estimated at around 39,000 units. A figure of that size cannot be closed through isolated measures. It calls for a steady and substantial increase in supply over many years. For that to happen, several things must fall into place: faster permitting, access to land, funding and, crucially, a construction sector in Cyprus capable of keeping pace. However, the same report notes that, in October 2025, 41.4 per cent of Cypriot construction firms expected labour shortages to limit their output, compared with 27.5 per cent across the European Union. At the same time, productivity in the Cypriot construction sector stands at roughly 67 per cent of the European level. Taken together, those two figures point to something more fundamental than a staffing problem. They show that, if we want to create thousands of new homes, the question is not simply how many we build, but how we build them. Housing in Cyprus is still developed in the traditional way: build, sell and, from then on, manage each property separately, usually by the owner. In larger European markets, by contrast, more organised models have emerged, with greater involvement from institutional investors, developers and professional operators. One of them is Build-to-Rent. Its defining feature is not simply that the homes are built to be rented. Rather, an entire development is conceived from the outset as long-term housing infrastructure, remains under single ownership or management and is run professionally over many years. That changes the investor’s incentives. The success of the project is not decided at the point of sale. It rests instead on the quality of the build, the cost of maintenance, energy performance and how well the development works over decades. Anyone who remains with a project has every reason to get it right from the start. If Cyprus genuinely wants to close a housing gap of tens of thousands of units, it needs to create the right conditions for more private and institutional investment in housing to flow into the creation of new homes. And that is where a significant part of the next debate on housing policy in Cyprus belongs. Not only in how we support those who want to buy or rent a home, but also in how we attract those capable of creating thousands of new homes and managing them professionally over the long term. For that to happen, Cyprus needs organised planning and tax incentives, greater predictability in permitting and, above all, a stable framework for long-term investment. Build-to-Rent in Cyprus, meanwhile, need not be treated as a theoretical idea that the country must discover from scratch. The model is already established in larger markets, offering the chance to study both what has worked and what has not. The point is not to copy a foreign model blindly. It is to consider which of its elements suit the scale and needs of the Cypriot market: development at greater scale, professional management, a long-term investment outlook and homes designed from the outset to be lived in rather than sold. Because the Cyprus housing shortage is, above all, a crisis of supply. And when the gap is measured in tens of thousands of homes, the response must be equal to the scale of the problem.